Buddy
by Sevandor1
Summary: Minion wants to "adopt" a pet. Megamind begs to differ. Pre-movie/post-movie.


This is original fan work, intended solely for the entertainment of the readers, and in no way intends any infringement on any copyrights, trademarks, or licenses held by Dreamworks Animation SKG, Alan Schoolcroft, Brent Simons, or the holders of any other legal rights or licenses pertaining to Megamind.

This story was inspired by a real event in my life. Megamind just gave it an outlet to turn it into a humorous story.

* * *

_A few months before events of the movie..._

"Minion, what is _that?"_

Hearing the extremely puzzled tone in his master's voice, Minion paused in his preparations for the Boss's upcoming bout with Metroman to see what had Megamind — who ordinarily would not admit to ignorance on any subject — so perplexed. The blue-skinned alien was seated in his oversized leather executive chair, doing a routine scan of the various security cameras that monitored the Evil Lair's myriad hidden entrances. One of his long fingers was rather melodramatically pointed toward a particular monitor. Its screen showed the area near what they considered their back door; outside it, the worn concrete step was spattered with spots of white and black, of some indeterminate substance.

"Well, I can't be sure, sir," Minion ventured, "but it looks like it could be some kind of animal droppings. You know we've had some problems with mice and rats coming in from that alley."

The self-proclaimed villain scowled at the same time he shuddered. Many of the creatures that were considered evil — rats, snakes, bugs, worms, all the things that crept and slunk and slithered in the shadowy and slimy places of the world — totally grossed him out. For a so-called supervillain, he was remarkably squeamish. The prison may not have been a cushy environment, but at least it had been clean, and though all his lairs had been a bit shabby due to a lack of proper funding (not to mention a need to remain inconspicuous), they were never dirty. Minion and a dedicated group of brainbots saw to that. It was bad enough to know that vermin lived unseen in the alleys and sewers outside the Lair, but this visual evidence of their presence nearby was truly disgusting.

Minion knew how the Boss felt about this, and tried to be reassuring. "It doesn't look like it's very much, sir. I'll go clean it up and put out some new traps, and I'll check to make sure they haven't found any new ways to get inside."

Megamind let loose a huge sound of relief. "Thank you, Minion, that's an excellent idea. Perhaps I should have a brainbot patrol that area, too, just in case."

The sapient fish shrugged. "You could, but getting a cat would be just as easy..."

The villain shuddered again. "After what happened the last time? Absolutely not! Half the brainbots _still _haven't gotten over the trauma, and finding little pieces of dead mice in my bedroom every morning was worse than having the live ones scurrying about!"

Minion attempted his version of Megamind's pathetic puppy face. "Aw, sir, Muffin was just trying to show you that he was doing his job..."

Megamind rolled his eyes in an extravagant display of disbelief. "And that's another thing: what kind of name is 'Muffin' for the cat of a criminal genius?"

"The people at the animal shelter said that was his name," Minion defended half-heartedly, well aware that he'd picked the cat partly because he'd thought the name was cute.

From the boss's expression, he knew the truth as well as Minion. "Then you might've at least picked one that didn't sound so... so... simperingly sweet and fluffy. No, Minion, the whole thing was a disaster. I'm still cleaning fur out of half our circuitry, and I'm pretty sure that the 'cold' you said I had all summer was actually an allergy to felines. We'll just have to make do with other passive means of pest control."

Minion's sigh was wistful, not just because he missed the cute little fuzzball, but because the Boss was right about the problems with fur in the electronics — his own robot suit had been incapacitated by it three times during the two months Muffin had lived in the Lair — as well as the suspicious "cold" Megamind had caught the day after the cat arrived, and from which he recovered as soon as the Lair had been cleaned up following Muffin's departure. And he had to admit, he'd been a little creeped out, waking up each morning to find the cat's orangey glowing eyes watching him with the single-minded attention of... well, a cat watching a fish in a bowl. It had been unnerving, feeling like he was being sized up for breakfast on a daily basis.

So, he knew having a cat was out, even though he'd left the note about getting one on the Boss's idea board, hoping that maybe he might come up with a robotic substitute that could handle the vermin problem a little more efficiently than the rather dog-like brainbots. Resigned to it, Minion collected a mop and a bucket and headed out to clean off the step to their back door.

When he was finished washing away the offensive matter, Minion carefully inspected the area all around the door, looking for any signs of forced entry into the Lair or evidence to explain why vermin might be attracted there. Strangely, there was no sign of droppings anywhere but in the one spot he had cleaned, nor was there any indication that something had tried to gnaw or scratch its way in. Puzzled, he looked up in the direction of the all but invisible security camera. This particular door had once been the place where deliveries had been taken and dispatched back in the day when the warehouse had been in operation. There was a dilapidated wooden awning over the stoop, which had protected those handling paperwork during inclement weather. The camera had been concealed in the empty socket where a lightbulb had once illuminated the step. By Megamind's advanced design, the camera required no hardwiring, but the cracked and sagging external wire that had carried power to the socket had been left as it was, another bit of "proof" that the abandoned warehouse was still abandoned.

And it was on a particularly sagged portion of the wire that Minion spotted more droppings, and understood what was happening.

"Good news, sir!" the fishy alien reported when he had put away his cleaning supplies. "It's not rats or mice. It's a bird."

Megamind, who had been carefully studying all the other monitors in search of elusive rodent invaders, stopped, sat up, and blinked. "A bird?"

"Yes, sir. It's not there now, but I think it must've taken shelter there last night, during the thunderstorm."

The criminal genius considered this for a moment, his brow furrowed in thought. "It isn't a pigeon, is it?" he asked, his expression still dark. "I've heard they're as bad as rats and mice, carrying fleas and other vile pests..."

But Minion was confident. "No, sir, I'm sure it isn't. The place where it was perched isn't big enough for a pigeon, or even a mourning dove. It was probably a wren or a sparrow or a finch of some sort. Nothing bigger than that could fit there."

After another moment's reflection, Megamind visibly relaxed. "Well, if that's all it was, no harm done. I think it won't hurt our villainous image to have provided shelter for a little bird on one stormy night." And Minion heartily agreed.

The weather was clear that night, not a hint of storm. And come morning, the black and white spots had returned to the back step.

"It _was _pretty windy last night," Minion observed after mopping the step. "The little thing probably was more comfortable there than on a power line or on a roof. There aren't many trees in this part of town, after all."

Megamind — who had been working on removing a wrench that had gotten jammed into the "mouth" of an overzealous brainbot during the previous evening's game of fetch — grumbled distractedly. "Then maybe we should put an end to that by removing the wire. I don't need a backdoor escape route that's constantly being booby trapped with... bird droppings."

"But sir, we can't do that!" Minion protested, perhaps a bit too vehemently. When his master stopped working to fix him with a not-very-evil glare, he managed to sputter out a plausible explanation. "If we remove the wire, it'll destroy the whole 'abandoned for years' look you've worked on for the Lair. And if we fix it... Well, even a single new nail or screw would do the same thing, spoil the whole effect. Now, maybe if we had a cat, it could scare the thing away..."

This time, the glare was more convincing.

Minion sighed, shoulders slumping. "Okay, sir, I promise I'll take care of it as soon as I can."

* * *

Two weeks later, after the planned battle with Metroman and another escape from prison, the sagging wire was still in place, unremoved, though Minion somehow found time each day to wash the bird poop from the back step.

"I got a look at him one night while you were in prison, sir," the fish told his boss cheerfully during a fitting for a new Evil Cape to replace the one trashed in the last fight. "I'm pretty sure he's either a house finch or a purple finch — it's a little hard to tell, since he doesn't show up until after sunset, and he's skittish until he settles down to sleep. Not much light back there after dark, and when he's sleeping, I can't get a good enough look at Buddy's head to make a proper identification. But I found some pictures on the Internet—"

Megamind clapped one hand to his forehead in dramatic exasperation. "You _named _it?"

Minion was unruffled. "_Him_, sir, not it, and yeah, I guess I did. It was lonely around here with you off in prison..."

"I was only gone for three days!"

If the fishbowl could have blushed, it would have. "Oh. Yeah. Well, when you're away, sir, every day seems like a week." Minion almost gagged on his own mendacious exaggeration.

Fortunately, he knew the boss's ego (and desperation for any signs of genuine affection) would buy it, at least enough to let the fish off the hook. Megamind's mouth twisted into a truly remarkable something between a frown, a pout, and a smile as he digested this. "All right," he finally conceded. "The little feathered _squatter_ kept you company during my always temporary incarceration. But I think it's time we did something to oust it before it takes up permanent residence and brings more of its little birdie friends home to rest." He made extravagant flapping motions with his long-fingered hands to emphasize his point.

"I think you mean _roost_, sir. And he's definitely a male."

"Whatever. I don't want my escape exit turned into some kind of flap house..."

"The expression is 'flop house,' sir — though 'flap house' is actually a clever turn of phrase, when you think about it."

"Of course it's clever!" the villain preened, taking this convenient excuse to cover a second verbal slip in the course of two sentences. "I did some reading of my own before my escape, and from my research, bird droppings can be _highly _unsanitary! Not to mention full of diseases...!"

Again, Minion sighed. "He's only one little bird, sir, and there aren't any diseases he can give me."

Megamind opened his mouth, about to say, "I wasn't thinking about you!" but fortunately, his sometimes under-exercised conscience smacked him upside his considerable head before he could commit the faux pas. He closed his mouth again with an audible click, worked his jaw a bit as if chewing on the problem, then finally exhaled in a huge sigh of surrender.

"Fine," he grumbled somewhat sulkily, making it sound as if he was granting a concession of monumental proportions. "As long as you keep cleaning up after _him_, your little friend can stay — _outside _the Lair! Is that perfectly clear?"

"Yes, sir!" Minion replied with almost indecent cheer. "You won't even know Buddy's here, you have my word!"

And for the most part, he was as good as that word. Occasionally, Minion forgot himself and regaled his master with some little mention of Buddy, whom he had taken to watching for part of the night, as one might watch a pet. On the whole, Megamind didn't know what his old friend could possibly find so fascinating about a bird that did nothing but sleep and defecate, but he supposed that being a fish in a bowl on a planet in which people kept such creatures as pets, not companions, having the shoe on the other foot (or fin) for a change was a refreshing diversion. He stopped telling Minion not to talk about the bird, and indulgently listened to his reports each morning over breakfast. Letting Buddy use an old wire over the little used back door as his nightly flop house was a small price to pay, if it made Minion happy. He even told Minion to quit wasting his time cleaning up after their unlikely guest, since the rains that rolled through on a regular basis at this time of year kept the step clean enough.

After Buddy had been a part of their lives for about a month (or, rather, had been given Megamind's permission to occupy the awning over their back door), the criminal genius was at work in his lab, literally attempting to cook up one of his latest inspirations. He had to admit that he liked the sound of said inspiration's name — Typhoon Cheese — more than he had any clear idea of what it should actually _do. _But he was, in his own estimation, just as brilliant a chemist as he was an engineer, so he felt confident that given enough experimentation, he would hit upon just the perfect effect worthy of such a villainous name.

Minion was in the garage part of the Lair, giving the Invisible Car an oil change and a lube job when he heard a not so muffled _WHOOMPH! _from the upstairs lab and felt the small earthquake that could only accompany an explosion. He immediately ran in that direction, grabbing a fire extinguisher along the way. As he neared the lab, the overpowering stench of burnt Velveeta came rolling toward him like a noxious cloud; flinging open the lab door, the actual cloud of cheese-scented smoke gushed out, obscuring his vision.

"Sir! Sir, where are you?" he shouted anxiously over the complaints of several brainbots that were bouncing off the walls and each other, disoriented by the smoke and vapors and cheese detritus that had splattered their domes. Minion tried to wipe away the oily film that now coated his bowl, with little success. The sound of loud and raspy coughing provided a direction, however, along with the relief that the Boss was alive and conscious. He moved toward the coughing as quickly as he could, finally locating Megamind when he nearly tripped over him. The blue alien was bent over, clutching the edge of a seriously dented lab table, trying to rid himself of the lungful of vaporized cheese smoke that he'd inhaled when his experiment suddenly overreacted. Minion grabbed him by the shoulders to keep him from keeling over after they'd collided. "Sir, are you all right?"

Megamind wheezed and coughed at the same time. "Yes..." _hack_ "I..." _wheeze_ "mis-" _cough_ "-cal-" _wheeze_ "-u-" _cough cough_ "-lated-" _wheeze wheeze cough_ "oh, no" _hack_ "it's going to-" _hack wheeze cough splutter_ "-again...!"

Minion got the idea as something in the smoke-and-cheese-obscured mess of beakers and alembics and flickering Bunsen burners started to audibly lurch and bubble in a menacing way. He aimed the fire extinguisher in that general direction, not really hoping it would work, but figuring that anything was worth a try. "Hurry, sir, out the back way!" he urged even as he retreated from the experiment that was threatening a second detonation, nudging his master toward the door that led out of the lab, down a staircase, and into the fresher air of the street below. "I'm right behind you!"

The sound of a sickening _splurgch! _behind him was enough to get Megamind hustling toward the door, his boots slipping a bit on the oily residue all over the lab. Though the brainbots were only too happy to follow Daddy, Minion did so a bit more slowly. He aimed a blast of the fire extinguisher at the heaving mess, his stomach doing its own share of heaving at the sudden reek of rotting processed cheesiness that filled the room. The extinguisher foam seemed to be holding back the lurching mess — but only until said lurching mess started bubbling furiously, its negative reaction to the foam growing larger by larger by the second. Minion gave up and threw the extinguisher at the hideously expanding cheese monster and high-tailed it for the exit.

By that time, Megamind was already halfway down the stairs, his footing a little less than perfectly sure, what with the panicked brainbots trying to beat him to the door and the traces of the failed experiment still on his boots. He heard Minion's more sure-footed clunking start down the stairs just as an even bigger _WHOOMPH! _shook the lab and half of the neighborhood. The horrific wave of incinerated rotten cheese stench that rolled down the stairs nearly brought up Megamind's lunch from last Tuesday and turned his complexion far more green than blue. He reached the bottom of the stairs in record time, flung open the door, started gulping in huge lungfuls of the clean night air—

—and felt the whole world tip out from under him as one foot hit a patch of slick dampness on the back step. His poorly padded butt hit the concrete rather painfully, the slipped ankle twisted sickeningly, the back of his head smacked against the door jamb, and for a second, he thought he was seeing stars in the light polluted skies above Metro City. But the nearer glow from one of the escaping brainbots showed that he was looking up not at the stars, but at a ramshackle wooden awning. Peering down from its perch on a bit of sagging wire, a tiny bird blinked down at him.

"Cheep?"

"YOU!" the criminal genius spat, recognizing his ambusher and the cause of his unseemly fall. An accusing finger pointed at the culprit, trembling with something between anger and embarrassment. "I shall have you plucked and roasted over an open—"

Buddy shivered in fear, and dropped something wet and revolting that seemed nearly twice his size smack between Megamind's eyes. The alien's nose twitched once, twice as some of it slithered down along the bridge, slipped to one side, headed for his eye — and then he bellowed.

_"MINIOOOONNNNN...!"_

Buddy was evicted before the night was out.

* * *

_Mid-November, shortly after Megamind's change of career tracks_

Late autumn/early winter in Metro City was usually a mixed bag of cold rain, slushy snow, and ice storms, none of which made getting about a pleasant proposition. On one November afternoon not long before Thanksgiving, Roxanne had been covering the opening of a new exhibit in her blue boyfriend's museum, a display that dealt with his transition from villain to hero. While the reporter naturally had dibs on any report dealing with Megamind, this was a particularly important story to her, for it involved not only a landmark moment in the former villain's life, but it also marked the first public revelation of what had really happened to Metroman.

Megamind had been gracious enough to allow some of the truth to remain hidden, so that Wayne Scott didn't come off as a totally selfish jerk going through a midlife crisis who chose to abandon the city he had once protected. Instead, it was made to look as if the former hero had chosen a more honorable retirement because his superpowers were beginning to fail him — his televised weakness to copper being the first manifestation of their deterioration— and had faked his death in an attempt to buy some time alone in which to discover the truth.

Sadly, so the story went, the diminishment of his powers could not be reversed, and their erratic behavior as they failed posed a significant danger to the citizens of Metro City, so he had taken himself out of the picture for a while, for their safety. At the unveiling of the exhibit, Scott appeared, making a public reconciliation with his erstwhile nemesis and now successor; he also announced that he was embarking on a new career to explore his lifelong love of music. All in all, it was a satisfactory end to his superheroic career, and finally put an end to complaints from some newshounds and legal eagles that Megamind should be charged with murder.

Throughout the outdoor portion of the event, the weather had cooperated, but after it had moved inside, an ice storm had begun, which had gotten quite nasty by the end of the ceremonies. Though they had planned to go out to dinner afterwards, both Megamind and Roxanne were forced to admit that the increasingly inclement weather would soon make all travel hazardous, and probably have many places of business closing up early.

"I suppose that as the city's hero, I ought to be setting a good example in encouraging people against travel in such dangerous conditions," the blue alien said with a disappointed sigh. He had been looking forward to a quietly romantic dinner, the first they'd been able to arrange in weeks. He was hungry, too, having missed lunch because of last-minute changes to the exhibit that required his approval.

Roxanne's sympathetic kiss helped mollify him, though not as much as she'd hoped. She added a hug for good measure — a much safer and less painful move these days, since Minion had redesigned Megamind's outfits with a lot of artfully placed silver studs that were actually retractable spikes of variably impressive size and sharpness. They could be popped out like a porcupine's quills as additional offense or defense in the heat of battle, or when he felt the need to look dangerously cool. "I was looking forward to it, too," she admitted, "but not enough to risk my neck driving across town with the streets like a skating rink. Right now, I'm wondering how I'm going to make it home in one piece. I left my car back at the station, and I just heard from the news feed that the power's out in my neighborhood."

Megamind was about to volunteer for the heroic task of seeing her home safely through the brunt of the ice storm when he suddenly changed his mind. "Oh, if there's no power, you can't go home!" he insisted. "No light, no heat — why, you might freeze to death, or starve!"

Her freckled nose wrinkled. "I'm not thrilled with the idea, either," she admitted. "You have any better suggestions?"

Minion — who had been nonchalantly standing guard to give them some privacy from the slowly dispersing crowd — piped up. "You can come home with us, Ms Ritchi! The Lair's much closer than your apartment, and we have all our own generators. I can even whip up a special dinner, if you're willing to wait for a bit. There's this recipe for osso buco I found on Epicurious that I've been dying to try...!"

Roxanne was well aware of Minion's culinary hobbies, and she had to confess that the alien fish was a better cook than a lot of the chefs at Metro City's five star restaurants. "It's a good idea," Megamind agreed, adding, a bit shyly, "that is, if you don't mind spending the night with me — that is, at my... er... place...?"

The reporter smiled impishly. Their relationship was still fairly new, and while the also fairly new hero was no longer nervous over being seen with her in public (a thing that had caused him considerable discomfort early on, after a few rookie cops had spotted them together and tried to "save" her), he continued to have misgivings over how the public might react if they were spotted heading someplace truly private, together. "I thought you'd never ask," she half-teased, planting a quick peck on his faintly blushing cheek. "Even if all we do is eat supper, watch TV, and crash. I wasn't really looking forward to going home to an empty apartment when it was just raining, and your place is always _so _much warmer." He knew as well as she did that the living areas of the Lair were always kept warm in the winter, as Megamind's physiology was poorly equipped to deal with extremes in temperature, especially cold. But she wiggled her eyebrows at him in such a deliberately suggestive way, he couldn't help but laugh.

"You're a wicked temptress," he scolded, waggling one gloved finger in front of her nose before tapping it lightly, then kissing it. "But in this case, you're also right. An excellent suggestion, Minion!" he told his piscine sidekick. "Signal the brainbots to have them prepare guest quarters for Ms Ritchi, then fetch the Invisible Car!" With a flourish of his newest cape, he struck an amusingly dramatic pose. "We shall brave the frozen teeth of this nefarious ice storm together!"

Laughing, Roxanne shrugged into her coat, snatched up her purse, took his proffered arm, and together made a heroic march to the exit.

* * *

Back at the Lair, Minion soon had supper underway. Roxanne sat in front of the TV and enjoyed a mug of hot cocoa, while Megamind made a brief visit to the monitor room, which now kept an eye on both the perimeters of the Lair and many parts of the city. They had just seen a newsflash about a big chain-reaction accident on one of the city's busiest expressway overpasses, and Roxanne couldn't object to the novice hero's desire to make sure the usual emergency crews had the situation well in hand. If it hadn't felt so good to be warm and comfortable on Megamind's overstuffed leather sofa, sipping delicious homemade cocoa with real whipped cream, she might've gone with him, but for once, she told her nosy reporter side to give it a rest and let someone else handle things.

Megamind had been in earnest when he'd promised this would only take a minute, and if he'd only looked at the bot feed from the accident site, it would have. But out of habit, he gave a quick glance at the other monitors, saw that all was as it should be — then did a double-take. The Lair's perimeter monitors were all quiet; their new cameras were equipped for night vision, to keep track of potential intruders without the need for obvious external lighting. Everything looked perfectly normal, but he tapped the controls on one particular monitor to have the camera zoom in on what had caught his eye. And there, on the back stoop of the Lair, were scattered splotches of white and black.

_"You!" _he breathed through clenched teeth, remembering all too well the sprained ankle, bruised bum, and banged head he'd suffered in his last run-in with the feathery little interloper. "You, _Buddy,_ have defiled my doorstep for the last time!"

Like a cat in hot pursuit of the canary, he raced through the shadows of the Lair's "business" areas, down a labyrinth of unlighted corridors, and at last flung open the back door. Bitter cold wind whistled down the alley, but Megamind ignored it, glaring up at the icy overhang. There, the nail that Minion had used to pin up the sagging wire had come loose, and in that small gap huddled Buddy, his little black eyes blinking down at the outraged alien.

"You will _not_ start this again!" the temporarily not-so-heroic hero declared, shaking one fist at the avian invader. He then ducked back inside for a moment, searching for a broom or a stick or anything he could use to prod the bird from its perch. He had just realized that there was no such weapon at hand and was about to go fetch one — or his dehydration gun — when he saw a movement out of the corner of one eye. Expecting it to be another bomb like the one that had almost hit him in the eye on their last encounter, he recoiled slightly into the safety of the doorway. But when he saw what had fallen, he blinked, and stepped forward again.

The cold rain that had been falling during the early part of the storm had dripped down the length of the wire, gradually coating it with ice as the temperatures dropped. Buddy, now half-covered with ice himself, could no longer hang on, had slipped from his precarious perch, and fallen. He was now on the ice-encrusted stoop, flapping feebly but unable to fly with the ice on his feathers. So he sat there and tried unsuccessfully to fluff up his feathers for warmth, and shivered.

For a minute, Megamind could only stare. The sight of the poor little thing hunched up and shuddering in the cold and ice brought back a memory from his childhood, when he had "escaped" as far as the prison yard on what he hadn't known was a similarly miserable winter day. One of the less kind guards had spotted him where he shouldn't have been and decided to teach him a lesson, leaving the boy to sit out in the frigid ice storm for hours, without a coat, until his blue skin had gone almost dead white from cold. It didn't matter that the instant the guard's cruelty had been discovered, the warden had him kicked off the force and charged him with abuse; in young Blue's mind, the damage had been done, and another root of his anger against authority firmly planted. He remembered how it felt to be left in the cold, covered with ice, shivering and afraid, and his annoyance melted, along with his heart.

With a soft sigh, Megamind bent down and gently scooped up poor little Buddy, glad that he'd taken off his gloves so that the warmth of his hands could soothe the shaking little creature. "All right," he surrendered, for once not really minding the situation. "You win."

When he returned to the much warmer living portion of the Lair, Roxanne looked up with a smile. "That was longer than a minute," she chided amiably. "Anything wrong?"

The big blue head shook. "No, the police and fire department have things taken care of, and no one was hurt. The rest of the city seems to have taken it as a warning, everything's quiet. The patrol bots will keep an eye on things, just in case. Minion," he called, stepping closer to the kitchen, "a friend of yours stopped by to pay us a visit."

"A friend of _mine?"_ the sidekick echoed, trying to think of anyone outside the room who might qualify for such a description. He returned the lid to one of the simmering pots he'd been checking, and came to investigate. "Who...?" he began, until the Boss opened his hands to reveal what he'd been holding, ever so carefully.

"Buddy!" Minion cried with a delight that turned to concern as he noticed the bird's wet and uncomfortable condition. "Oh, sir, what happened? You didn't..." He couldn't bear to say it.

But to his relief, Megamind shook his head once more. "I'll admit, I thought of it, but then... Well, you know I'm not one to leave an unprotected little thing wet and freezing and shivering in the middle of an ice storm."

Minion smiled, understanding completely. "Yes, sir, I know. Thank you for rescuing him, sir. Is it all right if I set up a warm spot for him in the loft over the main furnace vent?"

"Yes, just make sure he stays out of the labs and my bedroom. And, Minion... no cages."

Minion nodded. He cupped his large metal hands so that the Boss could hand over Buddy. Megamind was just about to deposit the bird on the robot hands when Buddy deposited something else on his own. Disgust rippled most expressively across the blue face.

"Sorry, sir," Minion said sheepishly as the transfer was quickly completed. "I'll get things set up for him and be back in a few minutes. Supper's almost ready."

Roxanne, who had watched the entire thing with interest, raised one curious eyebrow. "Buddy?" she echoed.

Megamind sighed, but not from exasperation. "It's a long story..."

"I'll bet," she said with a quirky smile. "But it doesn't look like we'll be going anywhere tonight."

"Yes, well... give me a second to sterilize my hands, and I'll tell you the whole thing."

And he did.


End file.
